Monthly Archives: April 2007

What an amazingly bad end to a truly horrible night worth of sleep! Wow. I didn’t think that last night could get worse, but I was wrong. So – I am right on the verge of sleep. And my mom calls. Because she’s paranoid that Sami and I are upset with her (can’t imagine why that would be), this turns into a 20 minute long recap of the same shit we’ve been talking about for the past week. So I go lay back down and toss and turn, and then toss, you see, and turn, for the next two hours, I guess.

I awake the next day, convinced that I have overslept and that my pager is going off, I have positioned myself carefully on the edge of this hotel bed, so when I move my arm to find a light switch, I fall out, flailing to grab something, I get the power cord of my laptop, catapulting my glasses and headset off across the room.

The pregnancy dream I could deal with, a cursory look can easily explain it away: it was about hormones and loneliness and the inevitable ticking of my biological clock. I wasn’t happy about it, but neither did it hint at some critical problem.

The sleeping dream I don’t like as much, it seems a little more sinister and crazy. Not like, singing a song to a girl from the bleachers “Oh, Aaron, you’re so crazy” crazy, more like, collecting bundles of hairbrush hair from her garbage and smelling them crazy. This had all the alarm bells and flashing lights of psychological breakdown on it.

This last dream though, was sadly a pleasant change of pace. No sex, no children, no spliced sexual organs or facerape.

My father had a plan, I could tell, because of that jutted forward chin he gets when he has an idea he won’t be swayed from. We drove the go-kart balls out, through a series of more and more ridiculous tubes, that eventually turned themselves into a four lane road leading through a future-industrial row of skyscrapers.

My role in this was to drive him through the plate glass door. The rest would be easy, he said, as he checked the pistol in his hand and put on a windbreaker. It was simple, wait for him to come out, unless the cops showed up, then he’d find another way out. We crashed through the door in a cacophony of screeching metal and broken glass, he tumbled forward like a gymnast, springing to his feet with a wave over his shoulder, beelining for the back hallway.

I circled in the road for a while, “burning cookies” on the tiny tires, until I heard the approaching sirens. Not seeing my fathers exit forthcoming, I left the scene, ditching the kart when it ran out of gas, and pulling off clothes to alter my appearance. I ran around the back of the facility, desperately looking for a sewer grate to return home off the streets. I find one and run through the damp darkness, before I wake up at home.

My mother chuckles and says it’s her fault, she thought that heisting gold filament scraps from a local microchip manufacturer was a “viable revenue stream”. We tried to call his phone, but we got a notification that the phone user was in consultation with a lawyer. We both seemed to understand that this was a normal police procedure when they suspected someone of a crime but had no proof, to try to get his family to incriminate him. So we sat around and ate some popcorn and watched the news. We hardly even got startled when the cops kicked in the door.

They questioned me for an hour or two, the drugs made it hard to figure out what I was or wasn’t saying, but apparently I wasn’t saying enough to get arrested, because they released me. Obviously they didn’t have Dad either, but he still wasn’t home, so he was still at large. I began to be concerned that they would arrest me, and the implication of committing a crime would get me fired from my job. I started to ask my Mom what she thought about her chances if Dad got arrested, but she just said that was one of the benefits of being an entrepreneur, that the business would grind on without him at the helm.

I woke up just after someone indicated there were more dry foods added to the contaminated pet food recall, and I rushed to the computer to check the brand.